Transportation

Southwest recently announced a very different approach to providing in-flight entertainment. Partnering with dish network they will offer live TV and on-demand programming over the in-plane WIFI to people’s personal devices. Sadly, for now, it’s just Apple devices. I will presume they will extend this to other platforms, including laptops, soon, and they should consider also allowing you to rent a tablet one-way if you don’t have your own.

Everywhere else, we see airlines putting in “fancy” and expensive in-flight entertainment systems. In coach they use small screens in the headrests, and business class and 1st class seats have fairly large displays. I’ve tried a number of these, and uniformly, in spite of all the money, they suck compared to just having pre-loaded video on your own tablet, laptop or DVD player. Even your phone with its small screen is better. Why?

Almost every one of the systems I’ve seen has been badly written and underpowered, resulting in atrociously slow response time and poor UI

The ones that charge you sit there all flight advertising to you if you don’t pay. Clever people can figure out how to turn off the screen, but it doesn’t matter, because most of the other screens are this very distracting synchronized spam video. Worse, during boarding, they turn up the audio on this ad.

They pause your video for every little announcement, including non-safety announcements, spam to shop duty free or join the FF club, and translations of announcements into other languages. I can almost accept doing this for safety announcements (I would rather take a safety quiz online or at my seat and be free from the routine ones) but if you start your movie before take-off (which is a nice thing to do) you will be interrupted literally dozens of times.

The video, game and music selections are often quite lame compared to what you can get in any online store for your phone or tablet

The live TV has advertising in it, and you can’t FF or get up for a snack like at home. Unless its news or sports, why watch live?

There is often a surprisingly large box under the seat in every seat cluster for the in-flight computer. That takes away foot room and storage space and adds weight to the plane. Plus, why are the boxes so large — consider these devices seem to have far less power than a typical tablet?

If they have a touchscreen, the guy behind you is always pushing on the back of your seat. Otherwise they have a fairly hard to use hand remote (and for unknown reasons, long latency on button pushes.)

Disturbingly, movies are often played in the wrong aspect ratio on these screens, and you can’t do anything about it but watch fat characters.

The small screen ones tend to be fairly low resolution, mostly because they are older. Your phone or tablet is usually not that old and has HD resolution.

That’s a pretty astonishing list of failings. Your own tablet has one main downside — they force you to shut it off on takeoff and landing, for no good reason since tests all show a tablet does not interfere with the plane. It also may have battery limitations, though those are fixed with a USB charge port in the seatback. You do need to bring a stand for it, it would be nice if there were something on the seatback to mount your tablet. You would need an app to do plane-related stuff like the moving map or safety training.

What’s amazing is that all the other airlines have paid a lot of money to install these bad systems, and more to the point carry the weight of them everywhere. This is the classic battle between custom technology, which gets obsolete very quickly, and consumer technology like phones and tablets which are generic but replaced frequently so always modern. The consumer tech will always win, but people don’t realize that.

At first, they might have worried that they needed to provide a screen for everybody. This could easily have been solved with rentals, both out in the terminal and to a lesser extent on-board. Especially if you put in power jacks so recharge is not an issue.

Today the airlines would all be wise to tear out their systems and follow Southwest. I don’t care about the Dish Network streaming that much, but better (and more popular) would be on-board servers which offer a local version of the Google Play store and iTunes store containing the most popular movies and new releases. I venture those companies would be OK with providing that if allowed, and if not, somebody else would.

As a side note, let me say that it would be nice if the online movie stores offered a form of rental more amenable to flying. Most offer a 24 hour rental, which starts when you start playing (so you can download in advance.) However, they don’t offer the ability to start a movie on your flight out and finish it on your flight back. So you dare not start a rental movie unless you are sure you are going to finish it on the flight. Another case where the DRM doesn’t really match what people want to do. (I don’t want to “buy” the movie just to finish it later.)

I will admit one nice feature of the rental is that if I am on a flight, I can watch a movie, and that activates the same 24 hour rental period at home, so those at home can watch it there too. That way, if there is a movie we all wanted to see, we can all see it — if those at home are willing to watch it that particular day.

A nice result for Vislab of Parma, Italy. They have completed a trial run on public roads using their mostly vision-based driving system. You can see a report on the Vislab site for full details. The run included urban, rural and highway streets. While the press release tries to make a big point that they did this with a vacant driver’s seat, the video shows a safety driver in that seat at all times, so it’s not clear how the test was done. They indicate that the passenger had an emergency brake, and a chase car had a remote shutoff as well.

The Vislab car uses a LIDAR for forward obstacle detection, but their main thrust is the use of cameras. An FPGA-based stereo system is able to build point clouds from the two cameras. Driving appears to have been done in noonday sunlight. (This is easy in terms of seeing things but hard in terms of the harsh shadows.)

The article puts a focus on how the cameras are cheaper and less obtrusive. I continue to believe that is not particularly interesting — lasers will get cheaper and smaller, and what people want here is the best technology in the early adopter stages, not the cheapest. In addition, they will want it to look unusual. Cheaper and hidden are good goals once the cars have been deployed for 5-10 years.

This does not diminish the milestone of their success, making the drive with this sensor set and in these conditions.

This week I attended the Transportation Research Board Workshop on Automated Road Vehicles which has an academic focus but still has lots of industry-related topics. TRB’s main goal is to figure out what various academics should be researching or getting grants for, but this has become the “other” conference on robocars. Here are my notes from it.

Bryant Walker Smith told of an interesting court case in Ontario, where a truck driver sued over the speed limiter put in his truck and the court ruled that the enforced speed limiter was a violation of fundamental rights of choice. One wonders if a similar ruling would occur in the USA. I have an article pending on what the speed limit should be for robocars with some interesting math.

Cliff Nass expressed skepticism over the ability to have easy handover from self-driving to human driving. This transfer is a “valence transfer” and if the person is watching a movie in a tense scene that makes her sad or angry, she will begin driving with that emotional state. More than one legal scholar felt that quickly passing control to a human in an urgent situation would not absolve the system of any liability under the law, and it could be a dangerous thing. Nass is still optimistic — he notes that in spite of often expressed fears, no whole field has been destroyed because it caused a single fatality.

There were reports on efforts in Europe and Japan. In both cases, government involvement is quite high, with large budgets. On the other hand, this seems to have led in most cases to more impractical research that suggests vehicles are 1-2 decades away.

Volkswagen described a couple of interesting projects. One was the eT! — a small van that would follow a postman around as he did his rounds. The van had the mail, and the postman did not drive it but rather had it follow him so he could go and get new stacks of mail to deliver. I want one of those in the airport to have my luggage follow me around.

VW has plans for a “traffic jam pilot” which is more than the traffic jam assist products we’ve seen. This product would truly self-drive at low speeds in highway traffic jams, allowing the user to not pay attention to the road, and thus get work done. In this case, the car would give 10 seconds warning that the driver must take control again. VW eventually wants to have a full vehicle which gives you a 10 minute warning but that’s some distance away. read more »

The Vislab team from Parma, Italy, which you may remember did the intermittently autonomous drive from Italy to Shanghai a couple of years ago is back with a new vehicle, dubbed BRAiVE which tomorrow begins testing on real urban streets.

The difference is this car is mostly based on vision systems, the specialty of Vislab. You can see a photo gallery of the car but it deliberately does not look particularly different. You can see a few low profile sensors. They claim the car uses “mostly cameras” so it’s not clear if there is still a LIDAR on the vehicle or it’s just cameras and radar. The cars to Shanghai used an array of both cameras and single plane LIDARs. It is said that the sensors are “low cost” though an exact list is not given.

This will be an interesting experiment. Previous vision based systems have not proven adequate for urban driving. They have been able to do it but not reliably enough to trust people’s lives to it. Cameras remain attractive for their low cost and other reasons outlined in my recent article on LIDAR vs. cameras.

The sensors on this vehicle are not that obvious. There remain two schools of thought on this. One believes that a significant change in the car form factor with obvious sensors will be a turn-off for buyers. Others think buyers, especially early adopters, will actually consider unusual looking sensors a huge plus, wanting the car to stand out. I’m in the latter camp, and think the Prius is evidence of this. Its unusual shape outsells all other hybrids combined, even the more ordinary looking Camry hybrid, where the Camry is the best selling car there is. However, there will be markets for both designs.

It will be interesting to see the results of this research, and what rates of accuracy they gain for their vision system. Lots of competing approaches is good for everybody.

BART, one of the SF Bay Area’s transit systems, is on strike today, and people are scrambling for alternatives. The various new car-based transportation companies like Uber, Lyft and Sidecar are all trying to bump their service to help with the demand, but in the future I think there will be a much bigger opportunity for these companies.

The average car has 1.47 people in it, and the number is less on urban commutes. Since most cars hold 4-5 people, the packed roads have a huge amount of excess capacity in empty seats. While Lyft and Sidecar call themselves ridesharing companies, they are really clever hacks at providing taxi service. Lyft’s original product, Zimride, is more ridesharing but aimed at the long-distance market. Many companies have tried to coordinate true ridesharing for commuters and people in a city, but with only limited success.

A transit strike offers an interesting opportunity. Without commenting on the merits of the sides in the strike, the reality is that we can do much better with the empty seat resource than we do, and a transit strike can prompt that.

Of course, the strike is already naturally increasing carpooling, and casual carpooling (also known as slugging) also gets a large boost. In the Bay Area, things are complicated because BART is the main alternative to the Bay Bridge, and that bridge is going to get very heavily loaded. Ferry service is increasing but it’s still a 25 minute trip every 45 minutes from the various Ferry docks. The bridge and highways are increasing incentives for HOV-3+ carpools.

Casual carpooling tends to only get you to a rough area near your destination. In this case that may be OK, as other transit is still running, only BART is out. At the semi-official casual carpool stations, there are signed waiting places that get long lines for all the general destinations. You take what you can get, and it’s also efficient in moving cars in and out.

Computer assisted carpooling could schedule people together who are both starting and ending their trip fairly close together, for maximum convenience and efficiency. If the trip starts at people’s houses, or some common point, you don’t have the casual carpool concentration issue. If you start from stops of the transit lines which are running, you still have a problem.

Because of the load on the bridge, the ferry seems attractive, though there you have a chokepoint, particularly in picking up people from the boat. To do that, you would need a parking lot with numbered spaces. People allocated to a car because of a common destination would be given a spot number, and walk to the car there as they get off the ferry. A simple curb (which suffices for casual carpools) would not be enough.

Companies like Lyft and Sidecar make use of people who want to become part-time taxi drivers. While they pretend (for legal reasons) that they are people who were “already going that way” who take along others for a donation, that fiction could become reality in a transit strike. Most carpoolers would probably take along extras for no money, or gas money, especially when they gain a special carpool lane or toll saving as they do on the Bay Bridge. There would also be value in Jitney service, where a “professional” driver (who is just driving for the money, officially or not) takes 3-4 passengers along the common route, and they all pay a reasonable share.

Within a city, that share could be competitive, even with the subsidized cost of transit, which tends to be close to $2/ride. Taxi fares are $2.50/mile plus a flag drop, which means a trip of 3-4 miles could be competitive if split among 4 people, and not that bad (considering the higher level of service) even on trips that are twice as long. (The Bay Bridge is 10 miles long so taxi fares will have a hard time competing with even the higher BART fare.)

Jitney service (shared door to door or on-demand fixed route) is quite popular outside the USA, and indeed there are many cities with active private transit systems and jitney systems. But most Americans are not interest in the inconvenience of going slightly out of their way to deal with the needs of other passengers, and so attempts at such rideshare here don’t rule the world. It’s probably too late for this strike, but the next transit strike might end up demonstrating there are other systems aside from transit that are efficient and cost-effective.

The interface would not be too different from existing systems, except people would specify how much inconvenience they would tolerate from having others in the vehicle and going out of their way, in exchange for savings.

When it comes to robocars, this might happen as well, and it could even happen with vans to provide a very effective shared system that still offers door-to-door. Robocars also offer the potential for mixed-mode vanpool trips. In such a trip, a single person robocar takes you to a parking lot, where 12 other people all arrive within the same minute and you call get into a van. The van does the bulk of the trip, and stops near your set of destinations in a parking lot where a set of small single-person robocars sit waiting to take people the last mile. This highly efficient mode should be able to beat any existing transit because of its flexibility and door-to-door service. The vans offer the ability to be luxury vans, with business class seats with privacy screens, so that upscale transit is also possible.

The AUVSI summit on “driverless” cars last week contained 2 days of nothing but robocars, and I reported on issues regarding Google and policy in part 1.

As noted, NHTSA released their proposal for how they want to regulate such vehicles. In it, they defined levels 0 through 4. Level 2 is what I (and GM) have been calling “super cruise” — a car which can do limited self driving but requires constant human supervision. Level 3 is a car which can drive without constant attention, but might need to call upon a human driver (non-urgently) to handle certain streets and situations. Level 4 is the fully automatic robocar.

Level 2 issues

Level 2 is coming this year in traffic jams in the Mercedes S and the BMW 5, and soon after from Audi and Volvo. GM had announced super cruise for the 2015 Cadillac line but has pulled back and delayed that to later in the decade. Nonetheless the presentation from GM’s Jeremy Salinger brought home many of the issues with this level.

GM has done a number of user studies in their super cruise cars on the test track. And they learned that the test subjects very quickly did all sorts of dangerous things, definitely not paying attention to the road. They were not told what they couldn’t do, but subjects immediately began texting, fiddling around in the back and even reading (!) while the experimenters looked on with a bit of fear. No big surprise, as people even text today without automatic steering, but the experimental results were still striking.

Because of that GM is planning what they call “countermeasures” to make sure this doesn’t happen. They did not want to say what countermeasures they liked, but in the past, we have seen proposals such as:

You must touch the wheel every few seconds or it disengages

A camera looks at your eyes and head and alerts or disengages if you look away from the road for too long

A task for your hands like touching a button every so often

The problem is these countermeasures can also get annoying, reducing the value of the system. It may be the lack of ability to design a good countermeasure is what has delayed GM’s release of the product. There is a policy argument coming up about whether level 2 might be more dangerous than the harder levels 3 and above, because there is more to go wrong with the human driver and the switches between human and machine driving. (Level 4 has no such switches, level 3 has switches with lots of warning.)

On the plus side, studies on existing accidents show that accident-avoidance systems, even just forward collision avoidance, have an easy potential for huge benefits. Already we’re seeing a 15% reduction in accidents in some studies just from FCA, but studies show that in 33% of accidents, the brakes were never applied at all, and only in just 1% of accidents were the brakes applied with full force! As such, systems which press the brakes and press them hard when they detect the imminent accident may not avoid the accident entirely, but they will highly reduce the severity of a lot of accidents. read more »

I was sadly informed this morning by Ann Lowson that transportation pioneer Martin Lowson has fallen to a stroke this weekend.

Martin had an amazing career but it was more amazing that he was still actively engaged at age 75. We shared a panel last month in Phoenix at the people-mover conference and continued our vigourous debate on the merits of cars like his on closed guideways compared to robocars.

His career included leading a large team on the Apollo project, and building the world’s fastest helicopter, as well as faculty positions at Bristol, and you can read some about it here. For me, his big contribution was to found the ULTra PRT company, the first to commercially deploy a PRT. It runs today at Heathrow, moving people between the terminal and the business parking lot.

PRT was conceived 50 years ago, and many, including Martin and myself, were fascinated by the idea. More recently, as readers know, I decided the PRT vision of personal transportation could be realized on city streets by robocars. It’s easier to do it today on dedicated guideway, but the infrastructure costs tell me the future lies off the guideway.

That doesn’t diminish the accomplishment of being the first to make it work on the guideway. ULTra uses small cars on rubber tires, not a train on rails. They are guided by a laser rangefinder and are fully automated, with no steering wheel.

Last year I invited Martin in to give a talk to Google’s car team, and he got a ride in the car, which he quite enjoyed, even though it didn’t convince him that they were the future. But unlike other skeptics, I gave him the deepest respect for his skill and experience. People who can found companies and lead engineering and public acceptance breakthroughs while senior citizens are a very rare thing, and the world will miss him.

This week I attended AUVSI’s “Driverless Car Summit” in Detroit. This year’s event, the third, featured a bigger crowd and a decent program, and will generate more than one post.

I would hardly call it a theme, but two speakers expressed fairly negative comments about Google’s efforts, raising some interesting subjects. (As an important disclaimer, the Google car team is a consulting client of mine, but I am not their spokesman and the views here do not represent Google’s views.)

The keynote address came from Bryan Reimer of MIT, and generated the most press coverage and debate, though the recent NHTSA guidelines also created a stir.

Reimer’s main concern: Google is testing on public streets instead of a test track. As such it is taking the risk of a fatal accident, from which the blowback could be so large it stifles the field for many years. Car companies historically have done extensive test track work before going out on real streets. I viewed Reimer’s call as one for near perfection before there is public deployment.

There is a U-shaped curve of risk here. Indeed, a vendor who takes too many risks may cause an accident that generates enough backlash to slow down the field, and thus delay not just their own efforts, but an important life-saving technology. On the other hand, a quest for perfection attempts what seems today to be impossible, and as such also delays deployment for many years, while carnage continues on the roads.

As such there is a “Goldilocks” point in the middle, with the right amount of risk to maximize the widescale deployment of robocars that drive more safely than people. And there can be legitimate argument about where that is.

Reimer also expressed concern that as automation increases, human skill decreases, and so you actually start needing more explicit training, not less. He is as such concerned with the efforts to make what NHTSA calls “level 2” systems (hands off, but eyes on the road) as well as “level 3” systems (eyes off the road but you may be called upon to drive in certain situations.) He fears that it could be dangerous to hand driving off to people who now don’t do it very often, and that stories from aviation bear this out. This is a valid point, and in a later post I will discuss the risks of the level-2 “super cruise” systems.

Maarten Sierhuis, who is running Nissan’s new research lab (where I will be giving a talk on the future of robocars this Thursday, by the way) issued immediate disagreement on the question of test tracks. His background at NASA has taught him that you “fly where you train and train where you fly” — there is no substitute for real world testing if you want to build a safe product. One must suspect Google agrees — it’s not as if they couldn’t afford a test track. The various automakers are also all doing public road testing, though not as much as Google. Jan Becker of Bosch reported their vehicle had only done “thousands” of public miles. (Google reported a 500,000 mile count earlier this year.)

Heinz Mattern, research and development manager for Valeo (which is a leading maker of self-parking systems) went even further, starting off his talk by declaring that “Google is the enemy.” When asked about this, he did not want to go much further but asked, “why aren’t they here? (at the conference)” There was one Google team employee at the conference, but not speaking, and I’m not am employee or rep. It was pointed out that Chris Urmson, chief engineer of the Google team, had spoken at the prior conferences. read more »

I’m off for AUVSI’s “Driverless Car Summit” in Detroit. I attended and wrote about last year’s summit, which, in spite of being put on by a group that comes out of the military unmanned vehicle space, was very much about the civilian technology. (As I’ve said before, I have a dislike for the term “driverless car” and in fact at the summit last year, the audience expressed the same dislike but could not figure out what the best replacement term was.)

I’ll be reporting back on events at the summit, and making a quick visit to my family in Toronto as well. I will also attend the Transportation Research Board’s conference on automated vehicles at Stanford in July.

Then I’m back for the opening of our Singularity University Graduate Studies Program for 2013 at NASA Ames Research Park this coming weekend. My students will get some fun lectures on robocars, as well as many other technologies. Early bird tickets for the opening ceremony are still available.

On June 20, I will give a talk at a meeting of the new Silicon Valley Autonomous Vehicle Enthusiasts group. This group has had one talk. The talks are being hosted at Nissan’s new research lab in Silicon Valley, where they are researching robocars. I just gave a 10 minute version of my talk at Fujitsu Labs’ annual summit last week, this will be the much longer version!

SU consumes much of my summer. In the fall, you’ll see me giving talks on Robocars and other issues in Denmark, London, Milan as well as at our new Singularity University Summit in Budapest in November, as well as others around the USA.

There have been a wide variety of announcements of late giving the impression that somebody has “solved the problem” of making a robocar affordable, usually with camera systems. It’s widely reported how the Velodyne LIDAR used by all the advanced robocar projects (including Google, Toyota and many academic labs) costs $75,000 (or about $30,000 in a smaller model) and since that’s more than the cost of the car, it is implied that is a dead-end approach.

I have written an analysis of the issues comparing LIDARS (which are currently too expensive, but reliable in object detection) and vision systems (which are currently much less expensive, but nowhere near reliable enough in object detection) and why different teams are using the different technologies. Central is the question of which technology will be best at the future date when robocars are ready to be commercialized.

In particular, many take the high cost of the Velodyne, which is hand-made in small quantities, and incorrectly presume this tells us something about the cost of LIDARs a few years down the road, with the benefits of Moore’s Law and high-volume manufacturing. Saying the $75,000 LIDAR is a dead-end is like being in 1982, and noting that small disk drives cost $3,000 and declaring that planning for disk drive storage of large files is a waste of time.

I will add some notes about Ionut Budisteanu, the 19-year old Romanian. His project was great, but it’s been somewhat exaggerated by the press. In particular, he mistakenly calls LIDAR “3-D radar” (an understandable mistake for a non-native English speaker) and his project was to build a lower-cost, low-resolution LIDAR, combining it with cameras. However, in his project, he only tested it in simulation. I am a big fan of simulation for development, learning, prototyping and testing, but alas, doing something in simulation, particularly with vision, is just the first small step along the way. This isn’t a condemnation of Mr. Budisteanu’s project, and I expect he has a bright future, but the press coverage of the event was way off the mark.

Today the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency (NHTSA) released their plan on regulation of automated vehicles, a 14 page document on various elements of the technology and how it might be regulated.

No regulations yet of course, but a message that they plan to look hard at the user interface, particularly on the handoff between a human driver and the system. All reasonable stuff. They define 4 levels of autonomy (similar to prior lists) and say they don’t expect full unmanned operation for some time, and discourage states from even making it legal to use level 3 (where the driver can do another task) by ordinary folks yet — only testing should be allowed.

It’s good that NHTSA is studying this, and they seem to understand that it’s too early to write regulations. It’s pretty easy to make mistakes if you write regulations before the technologists have even figured out what they intend. For example this document, as well as some Nevada law documents, suggested regulations that required the vehicle to hand over control if the driver used the wheel, brakes or accelerator. Yet by another logic, if the driver kicks the gas pedal by mistake and does not have her hands on the wheel, would we want the law to demand that the system relinquish the wheel, causing the vehicle to leave the lane if the driver doesn’t get on it quickly?

At this point their goal is lots of research on what to do, and that’s reasonable. Of course, the sooner the vehicles can get on the road safely, the sooner they can save lives, and NHTSA understands that. I also hope that the laws will not push small players out of the market entirely, as long as they can test and demonstrate safety as well as the bigger players.

But I do believe in the idea of the self-driving electric taxi as the best answer for our future urban transportation. So how do you make it happen?

There’s a big problem with this vision. Electric cars today have perhaps 100 to 150 miles of range, which means 3 to 6 hours of operation, depending on the speeds you go. You can make more range (like a Telsa S) but only by adding a lot of weight and cost. But an effective taxi is on shift all day, or at least all the waking hours, and could easily operate 8 to 10 hours per day. While any taxi will have downtime during the day (particularly at off-peak hours) the recharge of the battery takes so long it’s hard to do during the day. Ideally you want to charge at night, when power is cheap. So let’s consider the options.

Large battery pack

You could make a vehicle with enough battery for a full day’s work, and charge it at night. This is very expensive today, and also takes a lot of room and weight in the vehicle, reducing its efficiency. You also need taxis at night so either way you have to have some taxis that work at night and recharge in the day, but not as many.

Battery swap

While battery swap did not pan out for Better Place, it actually makes much more sense for a robotic taxi fleet. You just need a few swap stations in the city. It doesn’t bother the robots if they take a while for a swap (mainly it bothers you because you need more stations.) And while humans would get very angry if they came to the swap station and saw they were 4th in line at 5 minutes/swap, robots would just schedule their swaps and get in and get out.

That’s all good, and it solves a few other problems. Taxis will be putting on lots of miles every day, and they will probably wear out their battery quickly. If the rest of the vehicle has not worn out, swap becomes ideal — replace the vehicle’s components when you need to, including the most expensive part, the battery. It also makes it easier to charge all batteries only at night, on cheap baseload power.

Swap also allows the batteries to be only used in the “easy” part of their duty cycle (from 80% to 20%) without much hassle. You only get 60% of the range, but you don’t care a lot, other than in having to
buy more battery packs. You just do the math on what’s cheaper.

Superchargers

A working supercharger that can recharge a vehicle in an hour solves the problem as well. Robotic taxis can always find a spare hour without much loss of efficiency. (Indeed with none as they will age by active mile or hour.) The big problem is that supercharging generally is felt to stress the batteries and reduce the lifetime of the packs. Certainly running a car on full cycle every day and supercharging it is not going to produce a happy battery.

A robocar supercharging station could do a few extra things, though. For example, you could hook the car up to a special cooling system to pump externally chilled coolant through the batteries, as heat is the big killer in the supercharge. You might even find a way to put some pressure in to keep the cases from expanding that much, as this is a big stressor when charging.

Supercharging probably has to be done in the day, with more expensive power. One charge for the morning peak and another for the evening. Some speculate it’s worth using your inventory of old battery packs to store power during the night to release in the day. Solar can also help during the day — on sunny days, at least.

While automated connection is good, you really would not have many supercharging centers, due to their high power needs, so they could have human staff to do the work.

Both the supercharging and battery swap stations do not need to be located all that conveniently for humans. Instead, you can put them near power substations where megawatts can be purchased.

More vehicles and ordinary L2 charging

If the batteries are more expensive than the vehicles, then perhaps just having more vehicles to house all your battery packs is the answer. Then you have vehicles spending their time idle, and charging at ordinary level 2 (6kw) rates. Full level 2 can add about 20 miles of range to a car like a Leaf in an hour. Depending on the usage patterns that might not be too bad. Of course it’s daytime power again, which is expensive. Urban taxis won’t go more than about 25mph on average if they are lucky, often less, particularly at rush hour. Suburban will go a bit faster. You need stations that allow a robot to recharge, which could mean inductive, or human-staffed, or eventual robotic plug-in systems. Don’t laugh at the idea of human-staffed. The robot will not be in a super rush, so stations near retail shops or existing gas stations would work fine as long as somebody can come out and tend to the robot on connect and disconnect within 5 minutes.

It may seem like more vehicles is more expensive, but that’s not necessarily true. It depends on how and why the vehicles wear out. Ideally you design the vehicle so battery and most major vehicle components all reach end-of-life at a similar time or that they can be replaced easily. That may mean a battery that can be swapped — but in the shop, not at an automatic swap station.

Plug in hybrids?

Plug in hybrids of course solve the problem, and they can charge when they can to be mostly electric and only use that gas engine more rarely. This actually creates a downside — it’s expensive to have a fossil fuel power train around to barely use it. And it adds a fair bit to the maintenance cost. This does allow for highway travel. Otherwise, you send a liquid fuel car to anybody wanting to do a long highway trip - save the electrics for the urban travel.

Very light vehicles

Today’s electrics use about 250 to 300 watt-hours/mile. OK, but not great. Efficient designs can go below 100 watt/hours per mile. That means doing 300 miles, which is enough for a full day in a city cab, needs only 30kwh (probably a 45kwh battery.) That’s a $22K battery today, but it will be a $9K battery by the end of this decade according to predictions. This might be quite reasonable.

First is a report on the Volkswagen XL1 the car that gets 100km per litre, or 260mg.

As you read the description, you would be likely to ask, who would buy a car like this, which takes so long to get to highway speed and skimps on anything that would add weight?

The answer of course is that only a small minority are willing to buy lightweight, super-efficient cars with poor acceleration because they save a bunch of fuel. The average American car owner spends less than $2,000 a year on fuel, and while dropping it to $200 would be very nice, it’s not something people are ready to compromise a ton of other important car features for when they buy a car. It’s even harder to justify it to go from $800/year in a Prius to $200 in an ultralight, especially if the car costs more because of it.

This is the fact about robocars which changes the game. Mobility on demand from self-delivering robocars rewrites all the economics of cars because it changes the question from “What car should I buy?” to “What car do I want to ride in for this trip?”

If you buy such a car, you know you will do almost all your car travel in it. You are saying to yourself, I will never go driving for fun. I will never go on a trip in the mountains. I’ll never put 4 friends in my car. Never, or almost never. People don’t want to say that to themselves.

All that goes away when asking the question about what to ride in for an upcoming trip. If you’re going to be taxied across town, never even taking the wheel, you don’t care that the car can’t accelerate. In fact, you would prefer a gentle trip with smooth accelerations. You don’t care if the car can climb a mountain, or drive in snow, or even go on the highway if this trip doesn’t involve a highway.

Because you don’t care about those things, you will bump the priority of other things — is it comfortable? Does it come quickly? Is the price low? The latter question will make you prefer the efficient car.

Some questions will remain the same. You’ll always want safety. But so many of the other factors change so much that all the economics of cars get rewritten. So expect to see more cars like this, or the Very Light Car or the half-width vehicles I have written about.

Google [x]

You might like to read this story today that looks inside Google[x] the lab which is making Googl’es robocar and where I have been a consultant. That lab rarely lets the press in. You may not learn a lot about the Google car project from it, but you will learn about the thinking there.

There are a growing number of apps designed to help people find parking, and even reserve and pay for parking in advance. Some know the state of lots. These apps are good for the user but also can produce a public good by reducing the number of people circling looking for parking. Studies suggest in certain circumstances a large fraction of the cars on the road are doing that.

This weekend, I attended the Maker Faire. I’ve been to almost every Make Faire, including the first, and now it’s grown to be far too successful — you can hardly walk down the aisles at the busy times. They need more space and a way to put more of it outside so thin out the crowds. Still, it is one of those places that makes you feel very clearly you are in the 21st century.

Early on Maker Faire realized it had a parking problem. The lot at the fairgrounds fills up now even before the event opens, and they manage various satellite lots and run shuttle buses to them.

This year they tried something interesting, a twitter feed with parking updates. They tweeted when lots filled up or re-opened, and suggested where to go. They took some limited feedback about lack of shuttles. I think that it by and large worked and reduced traffic around the event.

However, my judgment is that they were not entirely honest in their tweets. This year, and in prior years, they strongly encouraged people to go to one of the most remote lots, regularly telling people it was the fastest route to the event. This was not true. I don’t want to ascribe any particular malice here, but there is a suspicion that there is a temptation to make reports in the interest of the event rather than the user. This does have positives, in that cars diverted from near the event reduce traffic which makes the shuttle buses run much faster, but if you give wrong information (deliberately or by accident) this means people stop trusting it and you get the traffic back as more people ignore it.

For example, we stopped at a remote lot, and saw a very long shuttle line. We drove on to a closer lot (also reported as having spaces, but not reported as clearly a better choice) to find lots of spaces, no shuttle line, frequent shuttles and also a walk that was only slightly longer than the shuttle trip. read more »

Hints from the release this week of the 2014 Mercedes S-Class suggest that it doesn’t have the promised traffic jam assist. Update: Other reports suggest it might still be present.

The S-class only gets major updates infrequently, though an intermediate update will come in 2017.
A story on Auto Express quotes Mercedes as saying “We can do it now, but there are rules in place that we have to accept” but that a fully autonomous car will come before the next full-revision of the S class due in 2021.

Instead, this car features a lanekeep + ACC mode that requires your hand be “touching” the wheel, and starts complaining if you take your hands off for a while.

This is a setback on what was to be the first commercially released car. While the various state laws do not tend to cover cars that provide an autopilot that requires constant visual attention from the driver, Mercedes may have been afraid of the regulatory environment in the Europe.

In addition, there has always been a special risk to this approach. Even if you insist to the driver that they must pay attention, they will surely ignore that warning once they get away with occasional inattention — after all, they will send text messages now with no auto-driving at all. Car companies can build a lane-keeping car today, but to stop you from trusting it too much they end up with systems like “keep touching the wheel” or a gaze detector that makes sure you keep watching the road, and people don’t like these systems very much.

Will Volvo and Audi, who have also announced plans for lakekeep+ACC super-cruise cars also pull back? Cadillac, which actually uses the name super-cruise, has pulled back from their 2015 date while at the same time talking to the press about their testing program.

Senate Hearings

In other news, the hearings in the Senate yesterday had most of their focus on these early technologies, and as expected, both David Strickland of NHTSA and the various industry folks were gung-ho on DSRC for V2V and very eager to recommend that the FCC not be allowed to convert the DSRC spectrum to unlicenced as it wishes to do. Here is a summary of the meeting which was attended by only a few senators. Both Johnson and Rockefeller surprised me with their skill in the questions. While Johnson was not up on all the ADAS technologies, he was able to see through a number of the industry claims.

Today, a survey conducted by Cisco showed very high numbers of people saying, “yes, they would ride in a robocar.” 57% said yes globally, with 60% in the USA and an incredible 95% in Brazil. (Perhaps it is the trully horrible traffic in the big cities of Brazil which drives this number.) A bit more surprising was the 28% number for Japan.

When they asked people if they would put their kids in a car, the answer was lower, but only slightly lower, which surprises me, as I felt it should take a bit more trust demonstration for people do do that. The reality is that if 60% are saying yes right now, without having seen the technology at all, the real number is actually quite a bit higher.

The Japanese number is also curious, since our stereotype is that the Japanese are the people most accepting of robotics in the world.

An British Survey reported similar results, with highest desire in London — possibly also related to the amount of traffic.

Another survey from the UK asked the question “which company would you trust to improve car safety” with astonishing results. The winner was Apple, which has no announced car safety plans, with Google in 2nd place. What is shocking is that Volvo comes 3rd — really a close tie with Google, and Mercedes 4th. Volvo’s entire brand is to be the car safety leader, and Mercedes has been trying to take that status away, but I would never have guessed that the silicon valley tech companies would win this.

It’s even more surprising that Apple beats Google. While Apple certainly has a quality brand, Google is the only one known to be working on cars and safety. One has to wonder just how the questions were put to these new-car buyers.

Yesterday’s KALW radio show went pretty well, the phone-in questions were pretty reasonable. The MP3 is up on their site.

I will be a guest on Monday the 13th (correction — I originaly said the 14th) on a the “City Visions” program, produced by one of San Francisco’s NPR affiliates, KALW. The show runs at 7pm, and you can listen live and phone in (415-841-4134), or listen to the podcast later. Details are on the page about the show.

Other guests include Bryant Walker Smith of Stanford, Martin Sierhuis of the Nissan robocar lab and Bernard Soriano from the California DMV. Should be a good panel.

Here’s a roundup of various recent news items on robocars. There are now a few locations, such as DriverlessCarHQ and the LinkedIn self-driving car group which feature very extensive listing of news items related to robocars. Robocars are now getting popular enough that there are articles every day, but only a few of them contain actual real news for readers of this site or others up on the technology.

Tesla

An offhand remark from Elon Musk reveals he is interested in an “autopilot” some day for Tesla models, and has spoken to Google about it. Google declined comment. Musk says he wants a cheaper, camera based system, a surprising mistake for him. (Cameras are indeed much cheaper but not yet up to the task. LIDARs are super expensive but Musk’s mistake is in not remembering that electronics technology that’s expensive in early, small volume models does not stay expensive.)

The Tesla Model S is not a good car to make into a robocar though — it’s super fun to drive, and that’s part of why you pay so much money for it. Nothing wrong with fun to drive cars, but you should automate the boring car and leave the fun car on manual, at least for now.

Shuttles driven by maps

The Cybergo made by French company Induct is a low speed robotic shuttle for campus use. Particularly interesting is that it drives using a laser and mapping for localization — a similar fashion to the Google car and other DARPA challenge cars. It is able to mingle with pedestrians by virtue of just going slow enough to be able to stop in time and be safe.

The Oregon pullback is notable because one of the cited reasons was the desire to study V2V. While I have written recently on issues with V2V this moves it out of the “mostly harmless” category. V2V efforts will be useful for robocars, but not for decades, and I strongly believe it would be extreme folly to allow V2V issues to affect the progress of robocars.

Unlike Nevada’s law, many of the other state laws do not cover unmanned operation. While the reasons for this are obvious, because it’s harder to understand unmanned operation in the context of existing law, we should not forget that unmanned operation is where most of the real benefits of robocars accrue — self-delivery, mobility on demand, parking, self-refueling, service to the elderly and disabled and much more. Not that manned operation is a slouch, offering the reduced accidents and recovery of productive time as benefits.

California’s DMV recently held hearings in Sacramento as part of their process of writing the regulations required by the California bill, passed in 2012. The regulations need to be done by 2015 but may be done sooner. The US DOT also solicited comments last month.

Google hits 500,000

I noted earlier that Google announced it had hit 500,000 miles of autonomous operation on ordinary streets. Even more notable was chief engineer Chris Urmson’s report of over 90,000 miles without a safety-critical incident. (This is an incident where the safety drivers had to take over where the vehicle would have probably caused an accident.) That’s not as good as a human yet — humans have an accident about ever 250,000 miles in the USA, but getting much closer. 500,000 miles, by the way, is more than the distance to the moon and back — Google [X] always talks about moonshots — and more than many people will drive in their lifetimes.

Cadillac & Car Companies

Cadillac has pushed back the supposedly 2015 delivery for their “super cruise” product. It now will come later in the decade. Car maker conservatism is to be expected, but other makers are pushing their dates forward. The Mercedes 2014 S Class is still on track to be first.

BMW has announced a partnership with Continental, the major auto parts supplier. Continental has been pushing their cruising car for a while — I’ve ridden in it — but BMW has its own impressive effort in ConnectedDrive Connect. Today, it is quite common for systems branded by a car maker to actually be made entirely by a supplier, who gives up the branding and limelight for money. It will be interesting to see how this collaboration works. They will be testing on the autobahn.

Car company date forecasts continue to be long term, with dates in the range of 2025 for full autonomy as cited by BMW.

Bosch, another top supplier, has been making its own announcements of advanced sensors and other tools.

Fake Google Car in New York

A crew created a fake Google car and drove it around NYC. What’s impressive is how many people thought they were seeing the real thing.

Articles

While there have been scores of articles, I will point to my friend Virginia Postrel’s Bloomberg article on Silicon Valley and robocars since I was her prime source — so it must be good. :-)

A nice trick from Daimler which I liked — a system to be kind to pedestrians as they walk down the street near parked robocars that sense them. Their plan is to light the way for these pedestrians as a favour.

Whole magazine issue

The military magazine Mission Critical has devoted an entire issue to civilian robocars which includes an article on insurance by Guy Fraker (formerly of State Farm) and a few other items of interest.

More news to come. I have also updated my Robocar Teams page with more details on teams around the world building robocars.

I have prepared a large new Robocar article. This one covers just what will happen when the first robocars are involved in accidents out on public streets, possibly injuring people. While everybody is working to minimize this, perfection is neither possible nor the right goal, so it will eventually happen. As such, when I see public discussion of robocars and press articles, people are always very curious about accidents, liability, insurance and to what extent these issues are blockers on the technology.

This article comes in part from having attended the “We Robot” conference in April at Stanford University. While it was generally about robots and the law, robocars were probably the most popular topic. Several of the papers in the proceedings are well worth it for those interested in the law of robotics. (The real law, not the silly Asimov laws.)

In a curious coincidence, last week saw an unusual robocar accident in Brazil that caused minor injuries — on live TV no less. On a Brazilian TV show, professor Alberto Ferreira do Souza from the Federal University of Espirito Santo has just shown TV Presenter Ana Maria Braga their robocar, which features the smaller 32-line Velodyne LIDAR on the roof and various other sensors. After the successful demo, he reaches into the car to turn off the system and restore the car to manual. Unfortunately, the car has stopped on an incline, and in doing so from outside the car, this releases the hold on the brakes that their drive-by-wire system had and the car starts rolling down the hill, and the open door whacks Braga hard, though fortunately with only minor injuries. Here is a video and Here’s the story in Portuguese with a different video clip. I have no idea why a puppet parrot is commenting on the accident.

As you can surmise, the self-driving software was not directly at fault here, but rather bad human judgement in turning it off. Curiously, this is not the first time we’ve seen serious problems with humans not correctly handling turning systems on and off. I routinely show a video of my friend Anthonly Levandowski, who built a motorcycle for the DARPA grand challenge and forgot to turn on an important system just before the race, causing his bike to tip over right out of the starting gate. Volvo also had the “press demo from hell” when their crash-prevention system did not operate. It was reported that a battery had discharged by mistake, and that in recharging it they had disabled the collision system.

There have been several small robocar accidents. Just about every team in the DARPA Grand Challenges had a car go awry during early development and testing, and a few even had accidents during the challenge, with one small car to car fender bender and a fairly hard hit on concrete barriers. Google has also reported their car has been rear-ended while stopped at a light during testing — a situation where blame is always placed on the rear car.

Last year, I met Oliver Kuttner, who led the team to win the Progressive X-Prize to build the most efficient and practical car over 100mpg. Oliver’s Edison2 team won with the VLC (Very Light Car) and surprised everybody by doing it with a liquid fuel engine. There was a huge expectation that an electric car would win the prize, and in fact the rules had been laid out to almost assure it, granting electric cars an advantage over gasoline that I thought was not appropriate.

The Edison2 team made their focus on weight, though they far from ignored drag. Everybody made an aerodynamic car, but what they realized was that making the car light was key. And batteries are heavy, heavier than efficient liquid fuel engines. Hybrid systems, with both batteries and two motors are even heavier than what they built. They also developed a new type of suspension which was much lighter and allowed a simpler car.

Since the X prize, they have built electric cars as well — their techniques still work there, even if that’s not where they found the greatest X-prize results — and recently showed of their latest 1,400lb model which seats 4. (Though I can’t say I think it’s comfortable with 4.) Equally impressive, Oliver reports they have done succesful forward offset collision tests, and done well at them, contradicting a popular impression that small, light cars must be death traps on the road.

This bodes well for robocars. As I wrote 2 weeks ago, I think the small, light car is the future of transportation if we want it to be efficient, and the robocar can, by delivering such vehicles for people making shorter solo or 2 person trips — ie. the vast majority of all trips — make this happen.

Earlier, I brought Oliver in to give a talk at Google in the Greeen@Google series. Here is a video where I host him describing the car and their thinking around it. His thinking on cars is fresh and while it’s very challenging to start a new car company, here’s somebody who might just do it.

We’ve often said that in the most distant future, when car accidents are very rare, we will be able to make our cars lighter because over 30% of the weight of a modern vehicle goes into safety features. I think we can get those light vehicles even sooner.